General programming

This is a discussion on General programming within the Tech Board forums, part of the Community Boards category; I'd say you're missing out a lot.
Boost offers lots of stuff you may find helpful, such as boost::lexical_cast, boost::bind, ...

I was thinking when I finished these couple of books I should start with an intermediate book perhaps. And while on that think of a project to do. I was thinking about something network related like a simple proxy server. But that's after I'm confident enough with my knowlage and understanding of C++.

What IDE would be best? I'm currently using Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition but I feel it's quite big for my current status of knowlage. Half of the stuff I don't use. Is there any light-weight IDE with just a compiler, debugger, syntax highlighting, project management and maybe the drop down box auto completion thing that VS uses (I don't really need this but it comes in handy sometimes). Bloodshed looks good but it seems out of date.

Says it can use both the MingW compiler and the VS one (not the 2008 one though). It's not been updated in a year though which leads me to believe that they are not active anymore. I'll try it out. I can just uninstall it all in the end if I'm not satisfied.

GCC/G++ is open source, so anything you compile with it (and most likely any IDE that can use it to compile) also must abide by the GNU General Public Licence and must also be open source. It's good for writing personal projects and stuff, works quite fine, but if you're making larger apps it's most likely you will be doing so for the Open Source Community.

VC doesn't have those same restrictions, except for debug builds of your program, which you can't distribute. I'm not keen on the whole thing. I hear VC is a leaner compiler and does a lot more optimizations to your code than GCC/G++.

Also I'm reading Bjarne Stroustrop's - C++ Programming language book and so far like his approach to teaching the language. Granted I'm skipping over a lot of the basics, but the "tour" chapters in the beginning are nice to have if you want to review quickly, and jump to the meat of the book. I previously read MOST of C++ Primer but after a while it got a little wordy and put it down, but it's a really nice book.

GCC/G++ is open source, so anything you compile with it (and most likely any IDE that can use it to compile) also must abide by the GNU General Public Licence and must also be open source.

Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong. Dangerously wrong.

While GCC is under the GPL, it also contains the so-called special exception: the GCC license very specifically says that code generated with GCC/G++, or code linking against the runtime libraries of GCC/G++, is not required to be under the GPL.

Good lord, if it were otherwise, it would be catastrophic. Pretty much everything under Linux is compiled with GCC: non-GPL open-source projects like X.org and Mozilla. Closed-source essentials like the binary video drivers of ATI and Nvidia. Closed-source applications like Flash. We'd have none of those. Linux would be unusable.

Otherwise mostly, they're just merely different compilers.
Just like there are many different companies producing a product, there are many producing compilers.
It's mostly a matter of which IDE and compiler you're comfortable with.
Microsoft's compiler can be tricky to use from the command line, while GCC is must easier, for example.